


session 05

by saraheli



Category: LOONA (Korea Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Black Mirror Fusion, Alternate Universe - Not K-Pop Idols, Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Androids, Angst, F/F, ex machina!au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-07
Updated: 2018-12-07
Packaged: 2019-09-13 14:58:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16894761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saraheli/pseuds/saraheli
Summary: In all honesty, you didn’t hike often. You did it once a month or so when you needed samples or when your assistant insisted that you needed to decompress. When you find KW-96 malfunctioning on the forest floor, however, you think that your prayers to avoid failure may finally have been answered; as it happens, though, the machine is the key to finding something more human in yourself.





	session 05

**Author's Note:**

> anonymous request: Vivi x reader, the reader finds android Vivi broken down in the forest? I think this idea would be so cool! :)

You’d only been outside for twenty minutes, and already you were complaining to yourself in hasty mutters and swears that you “really should be working” or that “this stupid walk wasn’t doing anyone any good.” You should be grateful, you reminded yourself, that you had a lab assistant like Naeun who cared enough to remind you to take care of yourself; when you were a lab assistant in school, you hadn’t paid even half as much mind to those that signed your paycheck. You had always only cared about the work.

This project, in particular, was very exciting for you. Aside from it being your first independent engineering endeavor after completing your internship, this work was something that was close to your heart. Androids were not at all uncommon in day-to-day life: they were maids and nannies and service workers, and their motivations were rarely questioned as they were the products of software and programming, but every once in a while, there came anomalies to the system which could be frightening at their best and deadly at their worst. Your day job was to diagnose these issues so that they could be fixed or otherwise handled by whoever happened to own that department. Your private job (that you often called your “undercover project”, especially as it was asked of you by some government agent who you could not contact directly) was, officially, to “investigate these anomalous behaviors more deeply,” but it was unofficially to discover whether or not the androids created in government facilities were developing artificial intelligence.

The governing bodies of your country were afraid of what would happen if machines were to gain sentience, as most people in the world are, so they were ignoring morality as much as they could to bypass any possible humanity that could be ascribed to these robots. In other words, they were hoping, via your studies, to destroy it at the source so that artificially intelligent mechanical beings would never have to be a problem. You weren’t looking for that, though. You were hoping to find something else: some source for life beyond mankind, some proof that knowledge and feeling could transcend beyond flesh. For you, it was more of a journey than a project and, therefore, you poured yourself into it and ignored most other parts of life. You locked yourself away for days on end, tinkering with Turned-Ins until you could figure whether they were simply faulty or something more. More often than not, their malfunctions were nothing to be concerned with, and you would be out of things to busy yourself with. Naeun was always pleased when this happened, claiming that you could use your time off to “recharge” or something, but the empty days only made you antsy, so you found things to work on without fail. When you overworked yourself, though, she would send you out like this, locking the lab for an hour until you had “decompressed to her standards,” whatever that meant.

So, here you were, wandering through the woods (or what remained of them) that lines the outskirts of your neighborhood. It was silent aside from your own labored breathing and the rustling of leaves as they folded in and out of the brisk wind that threatened to pluck them from their branches. You swatted a strand of hair from your cheek and huffed, wrapping your arms around yourself. In your stubbornness, you had neglected to properly arm yourself against the cold, so you shivered as you continued on. After a few more paces, you took a seat on a patch of dry leaves at the base of a tree with a sigh. You pushed the balls of your palms into your eyes, enjoying the peace of your environment until you jumped at the sound of someone talking to you from nearby.

> **S E S S I O N 0 1**

“Ex-Excu-use me—” a stinging buzz interrupted the voice whose tones were laced with the whirring of some small fan.

Your eyes flung open, and you jerked your head around to try and find the source of the voice. “Hello?” You could hear the squeaking adjustment of mechanical joints, the sound all too familiar to you.

“I am KW-96, series n-nine, and-and I belong to J-Jung Hyebin. My-My physic—physical body has been compro-m-mised.”

You peeked around the tree and finally laid eyes on it. The android’s body was malformed, slumping back into the leaves as the shoulder and hip joints protruded from their normal sockets. Her steel interiors were exposed by the peeling back of the layer of silicone faux skin. Its eyes were lit up a fluorescent blue, veins of ice appearing to thread out from the center of its pupil through the imitation iris. Something wet was streaked down its visage, and soil spread in blossoms over the exposed bits of its surface through ripped, ill-fitting clothing.

“Aren’t you meant to find, or at least contact, a service center if you malfunction or get away from your household?” You asked tentatively, getting onto your knees and crawling slightly towards it.

The machine was quiet for a moment before responding, “There is n-no rec-record of such protocol in my soft...my software.”

Wrong. “Okay, well, consider this a reminder of the protocol. What’s the diagnostic on your malfunction?”

It seemed surprised that you had asked for such a thing, and its head twitched to the side. “Blunt for-force to the u-upper muscular systems. Destruct-ti-tion of electrical communications th-throughout sy-system. Interrupted sp...speech patterns and movement generation.”

“Your internals are probably fried,” you said frankly, heart racing as you finally neared the android.

It looked at you—gazing, rather—up through its eyelashes, an unusual behavior for a machine; they were most frequently programmed to look up with their whole heads, discouraged from moving their eyes in solitude for any reason for it often disturbed owners and encouraged human-like micro expression capabilities. You cleared your throat and inspected some of the broken pieces before deciding that you couldn’t do this here.

“Come with me,” you said gruffly, not completely sure why you’d decided against alerting the authorities to the presence of this droid. “I’m an engineer. I don’t live far. I can fix you up and then turn you back in.”

You could hear the whirring inside its head as it seemed to process—contemplate?—your proposition. 

“According to the reminder you gave me of the protocol—”

“Which you didn’t seem to know a few minutes ago. Come on,” you gripped it under the knees and behind its back, cradling the freezing frame to you with less trouble than you’d anticipated. “They’d send you to me anyway.”

Its eyes scanned you as you helped it to stand, its jaw falling slack as the head dropped back to hit the nearby tree. If unconscious were the proper term, you certainly would have used it.

> **S E S S I O N 0 2**

When you got it home, you laid the droid out on your examination table with the help of Naeun. You brushed off her questions with the brisk wave of your hand, your mind a frozen whirlwind of stagnant thoughts as you turned to find yourself a pair of pliers and a screwdriver.

As was customary with any new experiment or project, you instructed Naeun to start a new recording file through the sound system. You decided that this would be considered the first session, making a mental note to retell the moments in the forest to your tape recorder when you were alone again.

You plugged it into your system and browsed her software while Naeun worked on its body, looking for any signs of abnormality in its processors and behavior generators; you found nothing out of the ordinary in the external layers of the code, but something twisted in the pit of your stomach, and you knew you would have to do some digging. This bot wasn’t normal, and you knew it. You could tell by the way it actively tried not to watch you work at your computer and by the way its fingers seemed to twitch in discomfort as its body was worked open and apart. Your heart raced at this bot finally being your big break, throat swelling in anticipation as you opened the software information panel.

“KW-96,” you said, not looking up from your screen, “can you tell me your origin and activation points respectively?”

 “My origin place is the Hong Kong Development Center. My activation point,” there was a brief break in its speech, “is the International Reseller in Seoul, South Korea where I was labeled KW-96.”

“Have you ever maintained any artificial or casual names given by your administrator or other persons?”

“Kahei,” it answered easily.

“Okay…” you replied, cross-checking her responses with the coordinates recorded in her file. You made a scribbled note of her ‘given’ name on a sticky note and pasted it to your computer monitor. “That’s enough. Please enter rest mode while I run another diagnostic test on your system and continue to perform repairs on your body. Enter waking mode again in one hour.”

Your eyes moved to where the droid laid on the table, finally, and you observed her response. Your heart thudded hard in your chest when you noticed the almost fearful bob of her throat in a mimicked swallow. Many droids verging on AI had this tendency, and it made your skin burn with excitement. You could feel a breakthrough at your fingertips, but you reminded yourself not to get too ahead of yourself. You had seen these signs in projects before, and they had turned out to be blips, infected code, nothing more than a virus. They had never been anything substantial.

So, getting down to work on the exterior of KW-96’s body, you set your mind on your goal in singularity as the buzzing in the droid’s head dulled to a weak hum.

> **S E S S I O N 0 3**

The next morning, you drank your coffee by the monitors. You had housed KW-96 in an observable room once you finished its repairs, claiming that you were still running diagnostics before turning it in to the government. You watched it roam around the space you’d cleared for it, inspecting its newly mended torso with gentle taps of its fingers. You cleared your throat, writing down the behavior in your notebook. It was unclear whether or not it knew you were watching, but the movements of her—its fingers on the skin of the bared waist, hips, and full cheeks on the visage made you feel like you were invading some intimate moment of privacy. You averted your eyes from the screen and revised your notes.

You came to visit it later in the day, checking its processes in silence. You instructed her softly to lie on the table and connect to your internal framework. You could feel her watching you like a child observing his mother tie his shoelaces for the first time. You decided to ask her an experimental question, your throat running dry as you tilted your head to look at her. It.

“How are you feeling today?”

She nodded smoothly before seeming to recognize that she shouldn’t be responding to a question like that.

“I do not understand the inquiry.”

You let out a near silent breath. KW-96 is a grab-bag of all of the symptoms of artificial intelligence that you’d ever read about. It made eye contact, utilized micro-expressions, claimed to be unaware of protocols and messages that should be hard-wired into every android put out into the public, and, on top of all of that, it gave itself a name under the guise of being given such by someone else. You had to keep yourself from hoping; stay unbiased. Keep your mind clear.

“Are your processors and systems running properly?”

You watched as her eyes glazed over, turning a color that was not unlike the overcast sky, and—how long have I been doing that? You caught yourself referring to the android by human pronouns in your mind, and you had to refocus as you waited for it to finish the complete system scan. 

“Complete functionality has been restored to all processors and systems.”

* * *

The next few days were strange. You considered on a regular basis whether you should call someone or just wait for your supervisor to contact you. You wondered if there was an ad out for this missing droid, and, when you looked for one, you found it.

The news segment was broadcast as you ate breakfast at your desk, the sound of the anchor’s voice stilling your chews.

“KW-96 is a high-functioning 9 Series droid belonging to Senator Jung Hyebin. After undergoing serious damages to its I-frame, the droid malfunctioned and attacked its administrator, leaving the whole Jung family fearful and angry. A government alert went out early this morning, informing citizens of the area of the risk and advising that they stay inside their houses until the droid is repossessed. Emergency vessels and syndicates are searching the area for any signs of this missing bot. Any information will be rewarded. Any attempt to conceal this droid is punishable by law.”

It felt absurd to next hear about the weather.

Your breath caught in your throat, and you jumped at the sound of Naeun knocking on the frame of your door. Sighing, your shoulders slumped forward in relief.

“What’s up?” You asked, swiveling in your chair to see her.

“You’ve seen the news, haven’t you?” She took your lack of response as an answer on its own. “Of course, you have. Listen, you have to finish up whatever you’re doing. I know this...this android might be some kind of step forward for you with your, well...with whatever you’re doing, but I can’t, in good conscience, let you incriminate yourself by keeping it here too long. You’re harboring stolen property now. I want no part of it...I’m sorry, I—”

“Naeun, I understand,” you assured her, pushing the heels of your palms into your eyes. “I’m almost finished…” You got to your feet, “Don’t worry. I’ll call it in once I am. Promise.”

You wanted to have no intention of giving up KW-96. You wanted to keep it and study it and learn what it had to offer; you wanted there to be something more to her than you could see with the naked eye, but over these days, you knew you’d tainted your notes and recordings with wishful thinking. You cursed yourself each night for ascribing more meaning to her actions than was present; you desperately needed a second opinion. You needed to see if someone else could be enchanted—tricked, maybe—by her as much as you were, but who could you ask? Who could you trust with such a thing?

You were alone with Kahei.

> **S E S S I O N 0 4**

“You’re turning me in.”

The bot spoke to you before you’d even closed the door, your eyes widening as you looked over to where it stood, facing the wall, across the chamber.

“What?” In your shock, you barely noticed the natural contraction in its dialogue.

“Your intercom system is almost always activated. The sound broadcasts into my chamber, and this morning I heard you.”

“Oh.” Your arms hung limply at your side, your throat stinging with something that resembled guilt but really shouldn’t because you shouldn’t be able to hurt KW-96, not by doing something like this anyway. “The law says I have to once I’m finished with my study.”

“I’m aware,” it replied.

Another contraction. “Though, if I’m being honest,” _don’t get cocky,_ “I’m not sure it’s fair to claim you under the same laws as other stolen goods. You’re not a car, after all.”

“They treat us more closely to firearms,” it paused, “than automobiles. I am having trouble processing your previous statement.”

“Well, generally, humanoid beings or those with near-human awareness and intellect are governed under the law more closely to citizens, so, I just would think that bots like you would fulfill those criteria. Do you agree,” you moved so that you could see her face from where she still stared into the mirrored wall, “Kahei?”

Her head barely turned, eyes moving even farther to match your gaze.

“I think you understand me perfectly well,” you continued, raising your eyebrows at her.

She did something absurdly human then; looking away from you, you could hear her suck in the feigned exhale of someone under tension, her hands working themselves into hard fists at her sides. There it was again, that shouldn’t-be-guilt. You felt the overwhelming urge to reach out and touch her arm, to comfort her like you would someone you cared for deeply, but you hesitated.

“I know what it means to people like you for my kind to have a name and…feelings,” she said finally. “I know it means you’ll take me apart or make me into your success story. I know you’ll use what I’m saying now to support your argument for my AI, but pretending is worthless at this point.”

You felt like you’d been punched in the stomach. Your lips parted in awe as the voice flowed from her previously soundless lips.

“Senator Jung knew about me, too, by the way. He wanted me to love him…he wanted me to…well, I think you understand. That’s why I had to leave. They tried to destroy my body when I tried to protect myself…they tried to kill me, I…what was I supposed to do? And...and I wanted to believe you were different from them. That’s why I allowed you to bring me here in the first place. I could have very well resisted.” She lowered her eyes to the floor.

You felt your throat swell in synchrony with your heart; she trusted you. She could trust, and she picked to trust you. You felt warm and proud beyond any pleasure your studies could bring you.

“I’m sorry they treated you that way,” you breathed, hand finally finding a place on her upper arm.

“But you’re going to give me up to them, right? So how are you better? I’m a passion project for you.”

You let out a breath, “I said what I had to in order to ease Naeun’s mind. I didn’t want her to do anything rash…I understand if you don’t believe that, but it’s the truth.”

> **S E S S I O N 0 5**

“That day when you found me, I have to tell you that felt fear. I thought you might use me for scrap parts or use me like anyone else would,” she said, avoiding responding to your explanation immediately. She raised her head and looked at your reflection in the glassy surface that covered the wall. “I can feel just as much as you can. My heart might not race like yours, and I might not lose my breath, but I can _fucking feel it_.”

If androids could cry, you knew she would be. Her cheeks were crinkled like paper from the frown of distress forming on her mouth and the whine in her eyes. You know, now, that Kahei lives. KW-96, according to your studies, is sentient. With that knowledge, you took her wrist and brought her hand up to your chest, laying her palm over your pulse.

There was nothing to say as she felt your heart thrum under your skin, her fingers cool in contrast to your warm flesh. You watched doubt cloud and uncloud her eyes, dancing in and out as if the wind blew them at its whim.

“I promise I will keep you safe.”

* * *

Naeun called the authorities after a week longer. She apologized to you through frantic tears as you shoved papers into a backpack and filled your duffle with clothes. She ran after you, telling you that you wouldn’t get in trouble if you “just explained” what was going on because “you have an in with them anyway!” You went silently into Kahei’s chamber, finding her dressed in the clothes you had left, and took her hand.

“It’s time to go. Put what you want in here, leave what you can replace. Meet me outside the back exit in five minutes,” you gave her hand a squeeze, watching as her face beamed with nerves and gratitude. “I’ll be there, and we’ll get out of here. I’ll tell you more out there where there aren’t cameras.”

“I-I…okay.” You turned on your heel and, before you could dart back upstairs, she called out to you. “Thank you.”

“I haven’t done anything worth thanking me for yet, save it until we’re safe.”

* * *

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know yet,” you admitted with a nervous laugh, hands shaking as they gripped the wheel.

It was settling in that you had left everything you’d worked for behind: your life, your job, the only work you’d ever loved. Your eyes watered, lips curling up at the corners in a melancholy smile. Kahei looked over from staring out the windshield, her mind buzzing with something strange.

“What’s wrong?”

“I just…I’m leaving my whole life for some…someone I barely know,” you scoffed. “I feel like I should be stopping myself.”

Though she was unsure of how it was meant to feel, she was certain that guilt was like this—heavy and cold and prickly down the back of her throat. You had been her only home, and she was taking you away from what had been yours. Ticking her head to the side, she looked out the passenger window.

“I’m sorry you’re doing this for me.”

You shrugged and sank back against your seat, “Don’t be. I could have done so many things to get you out and stay. I definitely didn’t have to come with you, but, I mean, what would you do on your own? You’re like…you don’t know how to fare in this world yet. You don’t know—you can’t do it alone yet.”

Something warm blossomed in the pit of Kahei’s stomach, and she couldn’t tell if it was some kind of malfunction or a sensation created solely by whatever drivers in her head made her feel.

“I’ll be okay,” you continued. “Really. And, and…whatever happens here,” your pulse quickened at the thought of being on the run from the government. You felt sick. “Whatever happens here, we’re going to figure it out together. Nothing will happen to you if I have anything to do with it.”

You could hear her moving in her seat, the human sound of shifting combined with her mechanical joints sliding among their sockets eerily comforting.

“Okay,” she replied, her voice sounding small.

You couldn’t quite put your finger on when Kahei became “she” rather than “it” to you, but the transition had come as such a relief that you weren’t sure it mattered. Every fiber of your being belonged to her now, and you would do anything you could to protect the most incredible thing ever created by mankind and the most stunning being you’d met. Reaching over, you slid your hand beneath hers, allowing your fingers to feel the hardened joins in her knuckles and flexible beams under the pads of her fingers.

“You don’t sound sure,” you let yourself smile a little, the anxiety sighing itself out of your lungs.

“Are _you_ sure?” She asked you, eyes focusing on the twining pile of your hands on the console.

“Well, I’m driving us north at the speed limit when I really want to speed, and every time I hear a noise, I think they’re coming for us, so I think I have to be sure,” you peeked over at her.

“Right,” she laughed.

You’d never heard her laugh before, and the sound made your skin ring with the bells of her amusement.

“Wow,” you breathed.

“What?”

“I’m glad I met you.”

That sentiment would have, if possible, made reduced Kahei to tears. It lifted a drastic weight from her shoulders knowing that you _met_ rather than _found_ her. She was glad to have trusted you and glad to have stayed and glad to have felt safe even for a few moments in the car with you now. She couldn’t predict what would happen next even with the best formulas or processors or pieces and parts, but she would be with the first human on this planet that had given her the decency of being human, too.

Inspecting your profile as you drove, she clasped your hand in both of hers, “Me too.”  


End file.
